[Article originally published March, 5, 2022]
Singer, songwriter, electronic artist, and Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante celebrates his 52nd birthday today, as the band continue the rollout for their upcoming 12th studio album, Unlimited Love. The album marks the guitarist’s first with the band since 2006’s Stadium Arcadium, after which he made his second departure from the group to focus on his solo work.
Frusciante’s expressive and virtuosic musical sensibilities have provided the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ music with an additional dimension which encapsulates various elements of the experimental, art rock, psychedelic, and avant-garde genres.
Having spent his formative years enveloped in the works of creative masterminds such as Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa, Frusciante joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers – a band of which he had been a fan for a number of years – at just 18 years old.
With the group, the guitarist recorded the albums Mother’s Milk and Blood Sugar Sex Magik, the latter of which launched the band in superstardom on the strength of the hit single, Under the Bridge. These records would become some of the most beloved in the band’s catalogue, and Frusciante established himself early on as an essential final piece of the musical puzzle that was the California funk-rock quartet.
Disillusioned and feeling constrained by the pressures of success, Frusciante famously left the band in 1992 and became highly reclusive. It was during this time he released his first two solo albums, the highly experimental offerings, Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt, and Smile from the Streets You Hold.
In 1998, Frusciante would rejoin the Chili Peppers for the recording of Californication, an album which would return the band to mainstream success, and produce some of their most well known songs, including Scar Tissue, Otherside, and the title track. Californication was followed by By the Way and Stadium Arcadium, albums on which the guitarist leveraged significant creative control and further expanded the sonic palette of the band’s trademark sound.
In 2009, Frusciante departed the Red Hot Chili Peppers once more, this time to pursue electronic music as a solo artist. He was replaced in the band by friend, collaborator and multi-instrumentalist, Josh Klinghoffer. Klinghoffer would assume the mantle for a decade, recording two albums with the band – 2011’s I’m WithYou and 2016’s The Getaway – before the announcement of Frusciante’s second return in 2019.
Frusciante’s recent return to the Red Hot Chili Peppers has drawn significant attention from fans of the band, and their upcoming 12th album has been highly anticipated. The album comes on heels of the songs “Black Summer” – released February, 2022 – and “Poster Child” – released March, 2022.
Through his bold and uninhibited exploration of disparate musical forms, John Frusciante has become one of the most transgressive and forward thinking artists of his generation. The lack of confinement to any one style has allowed the musician to approach an instrument as general as the electric guitar with the creative abandon of Charles Ives in composition, or of Miles Davis in his pursuit of the trumpet as a means of creative expression.
Here’s wishing a happy 52nd birthday to one of the most unique and significant musical minds of the modern age, John Anthony Frusciante.